Sunday December 31, 2006 Happy New Year!
The new year has already arrived here in the UK. Happy New Year to you! I'm hopeful that 2007 will be a breakthrough year for Free and Open Source software in general, for the great people working to make it real and especially for the communities of which I am a part, including OpenSolaris, OpenOffice.org, OpenSPARC and OpenJDK. My resolution for 2007 is to make things better, one step at a time, throughout Sun's engagement with FOSS.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 31 2006, 08:18:15 PM PST )
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Saturday December 30, 2006 links for 2006-12-30
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If anyone has received one of these, is a developer and wants to develop software that doesn't make you Microsoft's bond-slave, I'd recommend installing OpenSolaris - these Acers run it well and NetBeans targets anything with Java including Vista.
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Mr Murphy says: "By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community..."
Posted by webmink
( Dec 30 2006, 04:19:56 AM PST )
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Friday December 29, 2006 links for 2006-12-29
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And a new terminal isn't going to make it any better - "Terminal 5 is due to open in March 2008. Although it will provide more potential sleeping space for involuntarily overnighting passengers, it does not address the central issue..."
Posted by webmink
( Dec 29 2006, 04:19:41 AM PST )
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Thursday December 28, 2006 links for 2006-12-28
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Professor calls patents on drugs the behaviour of Scrooge and calls for a prize fund to sponsor patent-free research. Fantastic idea, trouble is the rich guys like Gates are patent advocates.
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"The advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has unveiled a damning indictment of the trial of Saddam Hussein, saying it was so flawed the verdict was unsound." I hope the sentence is commuted, especially so Saddam can live & reflect.
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Hopefully the last we'll hear of this jolly jape.
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If you're like me you probably just want calendar sharing enabled. This resource is a good starting point.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 28 2006, 04:24:19 AM PST )
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Wednesday December 27, 2006 links for 2006-12-27
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(note there's no "benefit") Excellent summary of how Vista sells your birthright to earn Microsoft some comfort from Hollywood. We need popularist treatments of this spread far and wide since the effects neuter many freedoms.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 27 2006, 04:19:48 AM PST )
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Tuesday December 26, 2006 links for 2006-12-26
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Of course it is! Happy Christmas!
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A new album from Iona - a must-have on my wish-list.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 26 2006, 04:18:32 AM PST )
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Monday December 25, 2006 Happy Christmas!
In a move that seems a rarity for 2006, I am actually at home today with my family in Southampton celebrating Christmas. It's been an amazing year and I am truly thankful of the privilege of being in charge of Sun's Free and Open Source software strategy in the year that both SPARC and the Java platform were liberated. It's left me exhausted so I am not too much fun to be around, but everyone else is bouncing with energy so no-one will notice!
I hope the holiday season proves refreshing and joyful for you! If you feel need for some perspective, Minitaure Earth can provide all you need.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 25 2006, 12:00:01 AM PST )
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Saturday December 23, 2006 OpenSolaris Internationalisation
There was an announcement yesterday that may seem uninteresting to those of us in the English-speaking world, but which could have profound impacts elsewhere. One of the key attributes of the OpenOffice.org community is that, while there is a core group of developers doing an excellent job evolving the productivity suite, there is a huge international community making sure that OpenOffice.org is localised globally.
The most important feature of the community is that it provides speakers of 100 different languages and dialects with an office productivity suite in their own language. That's an achievement that the supposed market leader can only dream about - and it makes ISO 26300 ODF all the more valuable as an international standard. The truly world-changing aspect of Free and Open Source software is that everyone can have it in their own language because local people are free to localise it. More than that, because the work is done locally, it can be within an appropriate cultural frame, rather than carrying with it the linguistic prejudices of a foreign company.
So to that announcement. I am delighted to be able to say that Sun has just contributed the Globalisation source code for the Solaris operating system to the OpenSolaris community under CDDL, so that everyone everywhere in the world can have OpenSolaris-based operating systems in their own language and cultural frame. Starting the community was a huge step; this move could prove to have an even greater impact. Congratulations to the team!
Posted by webmink
( Dec 23 2006, 07:38:36 PM PST )
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Friday December 22, 2006 Blogger Downgrade
If you're a subscriber to my Daily Mink aggregator you may notice that stuff from my personal blog is not showing up. The reason is that I foolishly accepted Google's offer to "upgrade" to the new version of Blogger, which I use to maintain that blog. The change invovled associating my GMail account with my Blogger account, and the opening screen assured me that "nothing will change" in my blogs. Except, of course, they have dropped legacy RSS support, and even the cute workaround (a parameter on the feed URI) doesn't seem to work for blogs published via FTP.
Now, it wouldn't be so bad that they only had Atom support - after all, that's a modern and progressing standard - if it wasn't for the fact that the version of Planet Roller that I'm using believes there's an XML error in the feed. That makes it skip the Webmink feed altogether when building Daily Mink. I have no idea what the problem is right now - Dave is kindly building a fresh version of Planet Roller for me - but the effect is that my aggregator is missing entries. Apologies.
Update: With huge thanks to Dave Johnson, the Daily Mink is now working properly again using the new BlogApps.
Update 2: Dave provides details in a posting about proposed new features to the Planet tool.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 22 2006, 07:55:33 AM PST )
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links for 2006-12-22
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Run Java MIDlets on your desktop - another new project spawned from phoneME, the Free Java ME project.
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Set it free and see where it wanders.
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One of the leading lights of Samba, Jeremy mentioned his deep unhappiness about the NOVL-MSFT deal to me in conversation a while ago.
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This is just a crazy patent. Why is it up to us to play whack-a-mole and invalidate all these? Isn't it about time filing things with such obvious prior art was declared perjury?
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The title of the next blockbuster from JK Rowling is announced.
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A milestone for Looking Glass and huge congratulations to Hideya in taking his 3D desktop project to this point.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 22 2006, 04:23:02 AM PST )
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Wednesday December 20, 2006
Monday December 18, 2006 links for 2006-12-18
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This poem looks pretty miserable on paper, but read aloud by the poet on NPR just now it was darkly hilarious.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 18 2006, 04:18:16 AM PST )
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Sunday December 17, 2006 links for 2006-12-17
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What kid wouldn't be thrilled to find one of these under the tree?
Posted by webmink
( Dec 17 2006, 04:18:34 AM PST )
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Thursday December 14, 2006 links for 2006-12-14
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Sounds like a backward step to me.
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This is excellent, showing who owns which IP blocks.
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What George doesn't say is this is the inevitable consequence of a monoculture on the web.
Posted by webmink
( Dec 14 2006, 04:22:02 AM PST )
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